finished the loop last week, got the offer, taking it. here's what actually happened:
round 1: recruiter screen, 30 min. she was fast and organized, had clear timelines. said 2-3 weeks total which was accurate.
round 2: coding with a mid-level iOS eng. two questions, both on the easier-medium end. one was a string manipulation thing, one was basically 'implement an LRU cache.' i coded in Swift because they said i could pick any language but then the interviewer seemed mildly surprised? ended up fine. he asked me to walk through memory management at the end, not leetcode, just conceptual.
round 3: system design. i got 'design a photo/video upload pipeline that degrades gracefully on flaky networks.' very on-brand for Snap. i talked a lot about client-side buffering, retry logic, progressive upload chunking. they liked that i thought about the mobile client experience as part of the system, not just the backend.
round 4: behavioral with a senior eng and a PM. they asked about a time i shipped something imperfect under a deadline, and a conflict with a PM where i thought we were building the wrong thing. no gotcha energy, they seemed genuinely curious.
offer came 5 business days after the final round. salary + RSUs + 10% annual bonus target. team is working on camera features which is honestly why i'm taking it. the product has issues but the camera stack is legitimately interesting.